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Mile High High

Nov 13th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
10 comments

Last week, when nobody was looking, Colorado legalized marijuana. There’s some paper-pushing to be done, but at some point marijuana will be sold to those over 21 under much the same sort of regulatory mechanism as alcohol. The referendum got surprisingly little press, even here at home, and doubly even here in Colorado Springs, where Certain People just can’t shake the suspicion that somebody, somewhere, is having too much of a good time. I’ve been getting email from a few of my friends who have been (or maybe still are) users, asking me how we pulled it off.

It’s called democracy. People in Colorado got sick of a certain kind of intrusive government, and they kicked government’s ass. This is what initiative systems are for. As best I can tell it wasn’t that hard, for reasons I’ll relate shortly.

There was a Kliban cartoon in the January 1972 Playboy (this link is the best I could find) that simply nails the absurd position that marijuana has held in the national neurosis since the 1920s. In case you can’t see it well, the cartoon depicts a cop hauling a guy into the police station wearing a costume that looks remarkably like a certain illegal plant. The caption, spoken by the police chief: “I admire your initiative, Flynn, but we can’t arrest them for impersonating marijuana.”

For most of a century, we have allowed ourselves to be so terrified of a weed that even the idea of looking like marijuana gets our cortisol coursing. Carol bought a houseplant decades ago called a false aralia. The first time I saw it, a chill ran down my spine. (I had never seen the real thing except in books.) If it weren’t for the boggling amount of money wasted and the number of young lives ruined, the whole business would be sitcom fodder. It’s all now coming apart.

Here’s my analysis of why it happened:

  • Colorado has an excellent initiative system, which has largely been used to limit the power of government. Lots of silly initiatives get on the ballot. Almost none of them pass. The ones that do are generally worthwhile.
  • Colorado has had a legal medical marijuana system since 2000. The world didn’t end. Wild-eyed stoners weren’t enacting Reefer Madness in the streets. Nothing happened.
  • Although the chemical machinery of marijuana is poorly understood, it does seem to work in certain cases, especially for suppressing nausea in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Politicians who campaigned against MMJ back in 1999 were positioned as championing the suffering of dying people. Instant third rail.
  • The cumulative effect of our war on drugs is making even very conservative people question whether the benefits gained are worth the collateral damage. I know a number of Republicans who were very much for the initiative, though they denied being users. The issue did not fold along the usual dotted lines.
  • I was told by a psychiatrist I know that the hazards of marijuana are hugely overstated. I’ve read in several places that most of the pathology that we see in marijuana users has other unrelated causes. I know people who have been regular users since the early 1970s, and they’re all articulate, successful individuals. This used to be a contrarian point of view. No more.
  • That same psychiatrist told me that Obama instructed the DEA to back off individual users after he took office in 2008. I’m sure there are conservative marijuana users somewhere. I’m just as sure I’ve never met one. The Democratic base is full of them. Obama wanted to carry Colorado, and he did.

That’s “how we pulled it off.” Here, at the risk of getting screamed at by my conservative readership, is why I think it’s a good thing:

  • Legal marijuana means better, cleaner, and more predictable marijuana. One of my user friends out east says he envies the quality of the weed sold here and in California. What he gets in the alley is often dirty, contaminated with mold, and sometimes adulterated with other plant material.
  • Legal marijuana means that research into the uses of THC and the host of other active compounds in marijuana is more likely to happen. Research is now almost impossible, so what we know falls pretty much in the category of folk medicine. Knowledge is Good. Always.
  • Prohibition drives up prices, and money powers criminal activity. Cheaper marijuana probably means less money going to drug gangs here and in Latin America.
  • Local cultivation also means less involvement of foreign drug gangs.
  • Money and manpower spent suppressing marijuana is money and manpower not spent suppressing other, far more dangerous drugs. Meth is deadly, and it is not on my friends list.
  • There is a nontrivial amount of money to be had in taxes on legal marijuana. Yes, it’s a tax I myself won’t have to pay. I like that kind of tax.
  • There is a nontrivial amount of labor required to cultivate marijuana and create “downstream” products like edibles and tinctures. I’d rather those jobs be here than somewhere else.

None of this is original with me, but it’s the position I’ve come to after much thought and a fair bit of research. (Most recent piece of which: Super Charged by Jim Rendon. Decent, but not worth hardcover prices. Wait for the paperback or watch for it used.)

So. Given that even possessing marijuana remains a federal crime, will anything come of it? Invading Colorado with hundreds of door-kicking DEA thugs could turn Colorado red next election. Don’t wait up for it. The Feds will make a great deal of noise, but the same thing will happen as happened in 2000, when Colorado approved medical marijuana: nothing.

I think we’re approaching a sort of tipping point: The more states that legalize marijuana without dogs and cats living together, the sillier that all the sound and fury over marijuana becomes. Sooner or later the Feds will quietly fold, and even the Republicans will vote to repeal marijuana prohibition. As goes the US goes the rest of the Western world. It won’t be next year or the year after, but I still hold that it’s science fiction, not fantasy. Moreover, it’s dull science fiction. (Rather like Bowl of Heaven…but I get ahead of myself.)

Odd Lots

Oct 25th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments
  • Here’s yet another brick in the structure I’ve been seeing in psychological research suggesting that beyond a certain (reasonable) point, the more confident you are, the less competent you are.
  • The Japanese word I heard at MileHi Con but could not spell (and thus not find) is yaoi (boys’ love) which is evidently fiction targeted at women which portrays homoerotic/homoromantic relationships between good-looking young men. (Thanks to Erbo and Eric the Fruit Bat for clarifying this. I just had no clue.)
  • And while we’re identifying obscure pop culture icons and references, I’ve seen this guy somewhere. Who/what is he?
  • NASA’s new-technology space-based atomic clock has eight pins, and relies on high vacuum. George O. Smith would approve. (Thanks to Larry Nelson for the pointer.)
  • Switch to a “mechanical keyboard”? I never stopped using them to begin with. Modern “mush” keyboards were created solely to be cheap and are mostly useless. (I love it when I’m right–and thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • How many people lived on Earth when you were born? For me, it was 2,556,061,949.
  • The 99c MP3 of the Month Award here goes to Sam Spence for “Classic Battle,” which was evidently commissioned by the NFL as incidental music for football games. Dayum. Why doesn’t baseball get music like that?
  • Music, heh. Ever hear a piece of music that immediately made you head for the exits? Maybe that’s the whole idea. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the pointer.)
  • I’ve found a good home for my old Ampro CP/M system, and will be shipping it out shortly. Thanks for all the suggestions and reminiscences.

More Notes on a Victorious Vacation

Oct 15th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

I’m easily delighted. It’s one of the benefits of driving as much cynicism out of myself as I can. Cynicism is a kind of cowardice, in that it seems to consist of a morbid fear of being delighted. Screw that. Dare to be happy; it doesn’t hurt that much!

Case in point: The morning after we arrived in Honolulu, Carol and I took a walk around the immediate vicinity of the Hilton, looking for a breakfast that wouldn’t cost us $20 a head. McDonald’s might not have been my first choice, granting that I have a fondness for Egg McMuffins. But I like their iced coffee a lot, so when we stumbled on a McDonald’s, I ducked inside to get an iced coffee.

OMG: They had a spam and eggs breakfast plate!

We ate at McDonald’s. I was delighted. Their breakfast plates are a Hawaiian thing. Hawaiians of Polynesian ancestry seem to like spam, and whereas I have no least trace of South Seas blood, I too find Spam delightful. I didn’t have it every day (though I had it a lot) and now that we’re home from Hawaii, I probably won’t have it again until the next time we’re there. That way I won’t get tired of it, and it will retain its power to delight me.

Immediately adjacent to the Hilton Hawaiian Village is the Fort DeRussy Military Reservation, which these days is an R&R facility for current and retired military. This includes the Hale Koa Hotel, which is limited to military and retired military personnel, and several restaurants and bars, which are open to the public. I bought a tube of Pepsodent at the PX before I understood what the store was, and in doing so may have violated their policies; not sure. Their little outdoor fast-food restaurant (I forget its formal name) was spectacular, and the lunch I had there consisted of the largest and juiciest deep-fried chicken breast I’ve ever had. Like the Pepsodent, it was lots chapter than it would have been elsewhere.

I observed a phenomenon that I’ve observed before, and seems to be getting more common: talking on your cellphone in public as though no one else can year you. Granted, I was walking behind the young woman in question and there was no one immediately in front of her, but sheesh–we were on the grounds of the Hilton Hawaiian Village. I wasn’t really listening, but at her volume it was hard not to hear: “…yeah, and I scraped my f—ing pedicure off on the sand!” I only had to twist poor Bobbie Burns a little:

Oh wad some gift the Giftie gie us,

To hear oursels as ithers hear us!

25 Books That Changed Me Forever

Apr 6th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

Michael Covington’s recent entry on the books that made him what he is intrigued me, and I spent an hour or so today gathering a similar list. I’m not sure that the 25 books listed below made me what I am, but each one of them changed me somehow, and sent me off in a direction that was slightly (and sometimes greatly) different from the path I had been on before. I’ve listed them chronologically in the order that I first read them, and the number in parentheses is my age at that time.

Note well that these are not all fabulous books, nor are all of the many fabulous books that I’ve read in my life listed here. These are the books that changed me in some identifiable way. It’s an interesting exercise, and I powerfully recommend it.

  • Space Cat by Ruthven Todd (6). I don’t recall all of the books that my parents read to me, nor the first few I struggled through on my own, but it was the Space Cat series that made me an insatiable reader. Not all of what I read after that was SF, but it was SF that made me absolutely desperate to read.
  • The Golden Book of Astronomy by Rose Wyler, Gerald Ames, and John Polgreen (6). My grandmother and Aunt Kathleen bought this for me for my sixth birthday. It’s a big book, filled with beautiful watercolors of stars, planets, telescopes and spacecraft, framed with text I could read myself. Once I finished it (and I read it countless times) I never looked at the night sky the same way ever again.
  • Tom Swift and His Electronic Retroscope by Victor Appleton II (8). Tom Swift, Jr was my first exposure to YA SF, and this was the first Tom Swift book that I ever had. (It was no better and no worse than most of the others.) Although I had read YA SF and fantasy books earlier, Tom Swift touched a nerve and made technological SF an obsession.
  • The American Heritage History of Flight by Arthur Gordon (10). This was the first history book of any kind that just took me by the throat and held on. I learned much about invention, and the debt that all inventors owe to those who came before them. I learned that failure is no disgrace, if the effort was diligent. This book helped me dream vividly, and Samuel Pierpont Langley became one of my earliest identifiable heroes.
  • Using Electronics by Harry Zarchy (11). I’d read a couple of Alfred Morgan’s electronics books for preteens before, but Zarchy was a better engineer, and the circuits he described in his books just worked with less aggravation, when all you had were greasy second-hand parts tacked together with Fahnestock clips on a piece of scrap lumber. The book gave me the confidence to continue my study of electronics, which continues down to this day.
  • Retief’s War by Keith Laumer (13). Although I’d read Laumer’s wry The Great Time Machine Hoax a few months before, it took Retief to drive home the conviction that SF could be funny. Humor is pervasive. There are humorous moments in most of my SF, even in serious stories like The Cunning Blood.
  • Types of Literature ed. Edward J. Gordon (14). My high school was superb, and chose its textbooks well. This book, in its tank-rugged plain black binding, broadened my enjoyment of reading beyond SF and science to poetry, drama, essay, and “mainstream” fiction. I don’t know where else I would have encountered Southey’s “The Cataract of Lodore” or John Galsworthy’s “The Pack”.
  • Spectrum 5, ed. Kingsley Amis (14). This was the book that (finally) nudged me beyond YA SF and Laumer’s simple and often silly adventures to genuine adult SF. I was stunned by the impact that Miller’s “Crucifixus Etiam” had on me, and when I wrote my first SF short story later that same year, it was the stories in Amis’s Spectrum series that I was imitating.
  • The Lord of the Rings (14). As a young teen I was no fan of magicians and elves and suchlike, and if it had not been for the insistence of the first girl I ever cared deeply for I would never have touched it. Instead, I stood poleaxed before an entirely new creation, and I trace my love of SF world-building directly to Middle Earth.
  • World of Ptavvs by Larry Niven (15). When Niven’s character Larry Greenburg sets Pluto on fire, I gasped, put the book down, and thought (about the book, not Pluto): I wanna do that! Laumer taught me how to write space adventures, but Niven taught me to think big.
  • Of Time and Space and Other Things by Isaac Asimov (16). I always loved reading about science, but this was the first of many science books to impress me with the quality of the writing. Asimov’s written voice spoke to me as though he were right there across the kitchen table, talking to me as a friend would. When a few years later I first tried to write about technology, this was approach I would use.
  • The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained by Henry P. Manning (16). For all the BS about the fourth dimension that I’d read in bad SF, this was the first book that allowed me to take higher dimensions seriously. The following year, my science fair project on four-dimensional geometry took me to the city competition and earned me a silver medal. It also shook loose (finally) the close connection between math and numbers and allowed me to look at difficult concepts from a height, conceptually. (The numbers fell into place later on. Sometimes.)
  • Clarion, edited by Robin Scott Wilson (20). This is not an especially good book. In fact, when I read it I was appalled that some of the stories had even been published, and it all seemed to be due to this writers’ workshop that they had attended. So, having noticed from the introduction that the editor was local to me in suburban Chicago, I looked him up in the phone book and called him, and asked him how I could get into that workshop too. He told me. I applied. I was accepted. Six weeks after I got home, I sold my first story.
  • TTL Cookbook by Don Lancaster (23). This was the book that first got me tinkering with digital logic. More than that, it went beyond Asimov toward my lifelong ideal of writing about technology as though I were talking across the table to a friend. This became my trademark, and ultimately sold a third of a million technical books with my name on them, plus four years of columns in Dr. Dobb’s Journal.
  • Pascal Primer by David Fox and Mitchell Waite (30). I learned FORTRAN, FORTH, APL, COBOL, and BASIC before I ever encountered Pascal (and you wonder why I write my reserved words in uppercase!) but it wasn’t until I saw Pascal that I could say that I really loved programming. This odd looseleaf book with its offbeat cartoon illustrations proved to me that writing about programming could be enhanced by humor and good diagrams. I could not have begun Complete Turbo Pascal without reading this one first.
  • Conjuror’s Journal by Frances L. Shine (35). Purchased for a dollar in the closeout bin somewhere, this understated novel of a mulatto parlor magician who wanders around Colonial America was the first book I can truly recall moving me to tears, and the one to which I trace my love of rural American settings and country people.
  • The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant (42). You can read this in an evening, and if you do, you will know why reading history is important. I got it in a stack at a Scottsdale garage sale, and have read at least a hundred histories since then, few of which I would have otherwise attempted.
  • Good Goats by Dennis Linn, Sheila Linn, and Matthew Linn (43). The absurd cruelty of the idea of Hell (which eventually destroyed my mother) set me against religion for many years. This little book, more than any other, allowed me to start the long trip back.
  • World Building by Stephen L. Gillett (45). The math behind astrophysics turned out not to be as scary as I had feared. And so I began creating not just imaginal worlds, but imaginal worlds that worked. 18 months later, I finished my first adult novel, The Cunning Blood.
  • Julian of Norwich by Grace Jantzen (47). Wow! So my lifelong nutso optimism was not insane after all, and suddenly I had a patron saint. “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.” You go, girl!
  • The Inescapable Love of God by Thomas Talbot (49). This book finally made it clear to me that I could be a universalist or else an atheist. There were no other choices. A God who doesn’t want to save all his creatures is not all-good; a God who can’t bring it about (without compromising our freedom) is not all-powerful, and God must be both in order to be God at all.
  • Opening Up by James W. Pennebaker (51). To combat the deepening depression that began consuming me after my publishing company imploded in 2002, I undertook a program of “writing therapy” as outlined by Pennebaker. Maybe it didn’t save my life. It certainly saved my optimism, and got me back on the path after a nasty year of confronting the Noonday Devil.
  • The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson (55). Right Men are the cause of most of the misery that humanity seemingly cannot avoid. I would never think about authority figures the same way after reading this. Trust no one who has power over you. No one.
  • On Being Certain by Robert A. Burton, MD (56). This book put words to a suspicion I had had for some time: Certainty makes you a slave to that about which you are certain. A tribe, an ideology, anything. To be free you have to accept that all human minds (especially your own) have limitations, and that nothing–nothing!–can be known with certainty.
  • Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes (56). I’d been losing weight and getting healthier for ten years before I read this book, mostly by avoiding sugar. Now, finally, I understood why. I also now understand how Right Men like Ancel Keys can take almost any scientific field and turn it to crap. Good science requires that we be skeptical of all science, particularly science that obtains the endorsement of government, which (like pitch) defiles everything it touches.

I’m now 58, and it’s been a couple of years since any single book has changed the direction of my thought and my life. I’m about due for another. I’m watching for it.

Back Off, Man. I’m a Steampunker.

Mar 27th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

MattSchapsProtonPack.jpgAt the first annual Anomaly Con in Denver, at the Tivoli Building on the Auraria Campus downtown. It’s a specialty SF convention, catering to the steampunk subgenre. I came up Friday night and met Jim Strickland Saturday morning as the con opened. Jim had set up a panel for us with the concom, and readings from the two halves of our double novel.

I freely admit I had no idea what to expect. I have never been to a comics or media con, and in fact haven’t been to a traditional SF con in four or five years. I used to go to three or four every year, back long ago when the world and I were young and I was writing a lot of SF because my life was simple and I had not yet broken into computer books.

This was, well, different. There have always been a few people at cons in hall costumes. At Anomaly Con, probably 85% of the congoers are in hall costume all the time, and some of them are doozies.

Most, as you might expect, were Victorian gentlemen and ladies, plus the occasional mad scientist. But beyond that were some western card sharps, a few outfits clearly adapted from Civil War re-enactments, a couple of pirates, at least one pith-helmeted explorer, plus a scattering of zombies and a handful of imponderables that might be from some subsubsubgenre I haven’t heard of yet.

The effort and ingenuity that went into some of these costumes was boggling, and the cleverness factor off the charts. My vote for Best of Show goes to Matt Schaps, a young man who created a steampunk Ghostbusters proton pack out of the guldurndest collection of retro junk, including a 3-gang variable capacitor, a Model T Ford ignition coil, a J-38 Morse Code key, five or six vacuum tubes, a couple of IF cans, and a biggish woofer behind a brass shell salvaged from a ceiling fan.

At our panel, Jim and I discussed the necessary conditions for the evolution of a Victorian-style industrial age, and whether it was a fluke or an inevitable stop along the path from mud huts to interstellar empire. We used my Drumlins universe as an example, and explained how factors like freedom of thought, economic freedom, relatively benign religion lacking monasticism (and the nasty dualism that monasticism inevitably carries with it) and cheap energy would almost invariably create something like the England and the US of the 1890s. The panel was well-received, and afterwards we spent a lot of time at the tables in the hall tossing ideas around with interested attendees.

I’m about to head over there again, and will post additional photos this evening or tomorrow. My own hall costume is limited to a western-style vest and the ill-fitting top hat I bought for the Coriolis Millennium Christmas Party in late 1999, but it will do for now. Next time I might well lean a little western, since the Drumlins stories I’ve done so far tend toward space westerns more than steampunk. (Drumlin Circus incorporates some of both.) It’s been a lot of fun so far, and the setting is perfect: In the room where we held our panel, a huge two-cylinder stationary steam engine with a 10-foot flywheel lay in state, with small boys dressed like Oliver Twist scrambling all over it and spinning the handwheels. Crazy world, yes, but a good one.

Daywander: The Night Before the Night Before Christmas

Dec 23rd, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments

I spent an hour and a half this afternoon walking around the business district of a small town. Which small town doesn’t matter, but it was a decent size for a small town, with about sixty retail establishments running along four intersecting streets. I was pleased to see only five or six vacant storefronts, and I had to park on the far edge of things to get a spot at all.

But I don’t mind. I like small towns, ever moreso as flyover country is left behind by gigalopolises swelling toward some looming urban Chandrasekhar limit. There was bustle but not asphyxiation, and nobody seemed afraid of actually saying the word “Christmas.” As in most small town centers, national franchises are exiled to the margins. Down in the middle it was all small, locally owned businesses, so as gray as the day was, it felt good to be walking around, sniffing out the culture and picking up a few late items for the season before it got dark.

The owner of the local used bookshop was beaming: There was a line at the checkout, and everybody seemed to have six or eight books in hand to slap on the counter. I waited for things to quiet down again before asking her if she had any of Debbie Macomber’s Christmas angels books, starring angels Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy, who follow hapless heroines all the days of their lives, or at least until the happy ending. It’s a wonderfully droll piece of punwork, though I wonder if you have to be over fifty to get the joke.

“I have three of them!” she announced triumphantly, and sprinted for the Great Wall of Romance Novels, from which she instantly pulled two. The third seemed to have gone missing, until she remembered that it was part of the Christmas window display. She took a three-foot-long thing-grabber from behind the counter and plucked the book out from amidst a gathering of plastic angels, elves and Santa Clauses, knocking over a small pile of Sue Grafton (U is for Ubiquitous) and bringing along an inadvertent divot of white fuzz. Bang! Four thousand-odd books in the store, and the owner zeroed in on three of them in less than sixty seconds. What we lose when we lose small bookshops is people who know what books are in stock and precisely where to find them, people who not only love books but still read them.

There were two barbershops in town. Both were open, and both had guys sitting along the wall waiting for haircuts, not reading Playboy but hanging out, laughing and BSing and having a good time, so much so that I ached to have hair again, just to be in there with them enjoying the moment. I find it interesting that all barbershops are basically identical, no matter where they are, and that they’ve barely changed at all since my father first dropped me into one of those enormous chairs (on an upholstered elevator seat that was basically a piece of 2X8 covered with dark green leather and stuffed with something lumpy) when I was four or five, and let Louie the Barber have at my unruly mop.

I didn’t expect to find a Catholic store in such a small place, but there it was, complete with a life-size cardboard figure of Good Pope Bennie with his hand raised in blessing. Christmas cards were on sale and I bought some after a quick scan through the books and holy cards. Catholic stores are invariably conservative, often reactionary, full of short books with bland covers that might be paraphrased as “Sex is good…as long as you don’t think too much about it.” It occurred to me briefly that I was behind enemy lines, but only when I was close enough to the shelves of books to read the titles. As my research of these past fifteen years has shown, there is far more to Catholicism than just words. Rome may no longer be my church but Catholicism remains my tradition, and advent candles (also on sale) have dimensions of meaning that cannot be fully captured in text.

And so it went. I plunked out a tune on a thumb-harp in a music store, checked out the flavors in the ice cream parlor (all home-made!) lest something with malt in it slip past unseen (alas, no luck) and grinned at the dusty display of Seventies shoes in the window of a tiny shoe repair shop that had been there long before those shoes had been abandoned by their owners in the Decade of Ugly. Lamps, lounge chairs, lingerie–American life summarized in store windows, writ large enough to feel prosperous but small enough to be graspable at strolling speed. Woodfield Mall is downright intimidating, but this…well, I can live with life at small-town scale. A police car rolled by as I waited to cross the street, and the cop inside waved. To me. A stranger, an out-of-towner, nobody special but still someone important enough to treat with courtesy and welcome.

It’s been a bum year in a lot of ways, some I’ve written about here, and some I’m keeping to myself. Time has seemed out of joint. (Has it been Halloween already?) But now–yeah, now things are back in focus, with time running at its comfortable one-second-per-second pace. I think I’m (finally) ready for Christmas!

Odd Lots

Nov 5th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

The Zombie Bandwagon

Oct 31st, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

On this fine Halloween Sunday morning, I have to ask: W(h)ither zombies? I’ve read about why pirates like parrots, but the undying love steampunkers hold for death-in-self-denial has always puzzled me. I guess it’s part of the punk rather than the steam, and I’ve always been better at steam than punk. A recent blog post by Charles Stross has created enough noise in the blogosphere to wake the dead: Charlie is annoyed at the fact that steampunk has become a bandwagon, and he doesn’t do bandwagons. (My overall reaction to the post is that Charlie protesteth too much, and by the end sounds like he’s annoyed because he didn’t jump on the bandwagon when it rolled past his house.)

One place where Charlie and I agree: zombies. They’ve been done to, well, you know. He’s locked horns with Cherie Priest, a gung-ho Seattle steampunk writer who’s had a lot to do with populating the steampunk universe with shambling horrors, which she very aptly calls “rotters.”

The problem may be that steampunk as a subgenre is shattering, and parts of it are slithering across the floor and merging with paranormal costume fantasy. (I’ll know when I grab and read one of Cherie’s books.) Perhaps it’s time to claim a subsubgenre as “hard steampunk,” where we get to keep the pipe fittings but bury the dead. I could do that. I may already have. (See “Drumlin Boiler,” which I’d rather see considered steampunk than weird western.)

Zombies are not a new thing. I was given a zombie story called “Impulse” to read aloud at a Boy Scout summer camp campfire gathering in 1964, and it was decent. (I wish I could find it again, but I don’t remember the author. I think it goes back to the Fifties.) Unless I misrecall–and that was 46 years ago–it was about some sort of telepathic alien goo that tries to use a dead body as a disguise and finds it doesn’t work well. Surprise! I saw plenty of zombie movies as a much younger man, and have read more than my share of zombie fiction. (The best? George R.R. Martin’s “Override.”) To my hard SF mind it’s a difficult business. Biological systems are more resilient than mechanical ones, but after all, we call them “dead” when they don’t work anymore. If they get up and start working again, I find it hard to still think of them as dead.

In truth, what I mostly think of them as these days is funny. I have a whimsical novel called Ten Gentle Opportunities on ice right now that turns De Camp’s Harold Shea concept on its ear, and posits a sort of magic hacker from a universe where magic works as a consistent alternate physics (with spells a sort of immaterial software) who jumps universes to escape from an enraged magician and lands here on Earth. To escape pursuit while still in his own magical world, he makes his way into a zombie trap, where the zombies check in but can’t check out. Alas, physics is a bitch, whether magical or not.

Getting the dead to stay dead was an increasingly serious problem. Formerly living material was powerfully endomagical: Once the Great Magic of life drained out of it, a corpse would soak up any uncommitted Third Eye magic in its immediate surroundings, and if enough were available would get up and start shambling around again, breaking things and getting into fights.

For most of history, magic had been rare and valuable, and the few magicians in the world tended to be well-bred and tidy. Unnecessary or broken spells were always frotted back to the primordial chaos from which they had been drawn. Alas, as the archipelago grew crowded, younger magicians lacking an inheritance increasingly turned to drink and careless spellmaking to obtain what they wanted. Few landless magicians studied hard enough to advance to Adamant Class. The spells blikked up by drunken Ruby-classers were complicated and fragile, and rapidly broke down into increasingly tiny fragments that nonetheless had to be individually frotted to be rid of them. No one would bother, especially the Amethyst and Adamant classes, who thought of spellfrotting as something one did only to one’s own magic. So little by little, invisible grains of useless magic blew around the world on the very winds, ready to be absorbed by a corpse’s hungry substance.

Most folk lacking the Third Eye grumbled that Global Enlivening was a conspiracy by magicians, who were the only ones who could unbreakably bind a corpse to its own etheric shell such that both would comfortably and permanently disintegrate. Within Styppkk’s own lifetime, mean-time-to-shamble had fallen from a comfortable fortnight to only three days, and if a magician could not be found (and paid) to conduct a proper funeral and shellstaking by then, one’s deceased relatives would wander off, though walls as easily as through doors.

The problem had grown acute enough two centuries earlier that the world’s Adamant magicians had collaborated on the creation of the great lychfields, which were zombie traps: The bait was earth magic, which though powerful was not absorbed by dead flesh. The simple spell at the heart of every lychfield made earth magic smell like Third Eye magic, attracting zombies that were already ambulant. Once inside, they could not get out, and eventually exhausted the ambient magic they had absorbed and crumbled to bones and dust.

Styppkk had read it all in Wiccapedia, and as he got to his feet he felt around in his many pockets for the requisite spells. He knew how to command zombies and had done it a time or two, usually as a way of getting cheap if not especially skilled labor. This time what he wanted was a diversion. In only seconds, the shambling horrors in the lychfield would smell the magic he had in his pockets, and would turn in his direction. Then the real fun would begin.

Seconds passed, then minutes. Nothing. Styppkk looked around in the gloom. He saw no movement. There was no sound but the unnerving trickle of water down the granite walls enclosing the lychfield. He took a step forward, and crunched on ancient bones–then tripped over a motionless body that shuddered only slightly at the indignity.

Something was wrong, and Styppkk knew that in relatively short order, Jrikkjroggmugg would be over the wall and on his case again. He fished a clamshell phial from an inside pocket, snapped it open, and dipped his left pinkie in the dust it contained. Seconds later, his pinkie burst into brilliant but cold flame, and Styppkk could now see clearly to the far wall of the lychfield. There were plenty of zombies, but none were moving. In many places, they were stacked like cordwood or leaning against one another like tottering monoliths in a henge. Styppkk counted hundreds by eye.

On a hunch, Styppkk flipped down his helmet’s crystal daggers again, so to see how strongly the magically animated zombies were glowing. Nothing was glowing very strongly…but every zombie in sight was glowing identically. Of course! Like water, uncommitted Third Eye magic sought its own level, and newly-arrived zombies confined in close proximity to older zombies lost some of their magic to the lychfield’s older denizens, until at some point there was so little magic to go around that nothing was even twitching, much less shambling.

Styppkk fixes that, of course, and I get to make fun of the zombie fad on a large scale, while putting forth my own vision of magic-as-alternate-physics. (Want me to finish it? Then find me an agent. I’m not having much luck on my own.)

That’s my take on zombies. They’re kind of like reuben sandwiches or Drambuie: Not my thing on the consumption side, but as a bartender or deli owner I’d serve them up without a twitch to paying customers. (Hey, I sold lots of C++ books from Coriolis, right?) As for bandwagons, well, let’s consider that bandwagons don’t roll without customer demand to pull them. Sorry, Charlie. Zombies taste good, whether or not they’re in good taste. People are buying Cherie Priest’s books and those of many others who are plowing that same field, which means that zombies are now firmly planted in the fantasy landscape. I’m a starships guy by birth and I’ve been waiting for the elves’n’gnomes’n’dragons thing to die out for fifteen years or so, but by this time, them having taken over 80% of the SFF shelf space at Border’s, I’d say it ain’t gonna happen.

Which doesn’t mean I’m going to start writing zombie stories, apart from (perhaps) Ten Gentle Opportunities, which treats zombies only in passing. I will only raise for my fellow writers the possibility that unless you’re big enough to have your own wagon (as Charlie Stross certainly is) it probably makes sense to grab the first one past that you know you can ride–and if the other passengers’ arms come off as they pull you aboard, so be it.

Prayers and Squares

Oct 6th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

prayerquilt.jpg

St. Raphael’s parish surprised Carol this past Sunday with a prayer quilt. It’s an interesting church ministry called Prayers and Squares that I’d never seen before coming to St. Raphael’s, but it’s evidently quite common and his its own Web site. It works this way: A parish’s quilters (we have several) make small quilts about 30″ by 40″. At each corner of the quilt squares is a knot with two threads about 3″ long left free. Before the quilt is presented to its recipient (often while they’re still in the hospital) it is placed at the rear of the church or in the parish hall, and people tie a knot in one of the pairs of threads while saying a prayer for the recipient. There’s enough thread so multiple knots can be tied at any given corner, and thus the quilt is never “full.”

It’s a sign to people who are in the hospital that the parish is thinking of them and that they are not alone. Carol was not in the hospital all that long, but she was touched by the gesture, and later that afternoon while she rested on our bed, she put the quilt over her. The Pack stood guard, and vowed to shred any squirrel that dared attack her. (Aero is actually in the photo, but he went undercover to Carol’s right, so as to surprise any squirrel who managed to get past the others.)

QuiltEmblem.jpgIn the corner of the quilt is an insignia with Carol’s name and the date the quilt was presented.

Religion as a concept is taking a lot of flak these days for various reasons, but few recognize the force for healing and comfort that religion can be when it remains true to its purpose. Small as it is, our parish does all sorts of things that might be listed under “aid and comfort,” including a food pantry that was recognized last year as the best in the Colorado Diocese. Nobody talks it up, nobody brags. They just do it.

Carol puts the quilt over herself every night, and I suspect she will long after her illness is just a memory. Whether or not you believe in God, I think it’s always possible to believe that helping others is the highest good that we can aspire to, and an awful lot of that happens where nobody but those involved ever notice.

Odd Lots

Oct 5th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments
  • I’m still pretty sore from lingering shingles pain on my back, and a little grouchy in consequence, though I’m trying manfully not to show it. On the good news end, Carol is much better, and we both had cheese ravioli last night. I think it was the first meal worthy of the name that she’s had in almost two weeks.
  • Anger really does make you lose: Sony has condemned “No Pressure” and completely disassociated itself from 10:10.
  • From the Terms-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: milk float, a small delivery vehicle (often electric) used to deliver milk in urban England. Some photos here.
  • And another from that department: steamdevil, a small vortex of condensed water vapor rising into cold air from a warm body of water like a lake or a river. This is the time of year you tend to see them, and Spaceweather posted a nice example from Wisconsin.
  • I’ve always suspected that grains aren’t good for me, but here’s some analysis as to why. Your Body May Vary, but a lot of this sure sounds familiar. Note well the caution on soybeans, which give both Carol and me a lot of trouble.
  • Napa’s cool summer has winemakers biting their nails: They may lose much (and perhaps all) of their harvest if a freeze comes before the grapes mature, but if they can walk the tightrope to harvest without falling, this year’s late-harvest wines (my favorite kind) could be spectacular. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • The Colorado Springs marijuana industry has made the New York Times , and has injected new life into local newspapers. I like The Independent, our quirky little free paper (its offices are in an old church with interesting architecture) and every issue I flip through down at the Black Bear Coffeehouse has another page of MMD ads. The latest issue had a 48-page pull-out supplement, devoted entirely to You Know What. The world is clearly crazier than we can imagine.
  • Mars may have had not only oceans, but (c’mon, this is obvious!) also icebergs. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
  • Australia is about to get its first native-born Roman Catholic saint: Sister Mary Helen MacKillop, who in 1870 got a child-abuser priest removed from his position. In retaliation, friends of the priest orchestrated her excommunication, but she was exonerated in 1872. She will be canonized later this month, and I’d say she now stands fair to become the patron saint of whistleblowers.
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